Trojans Horses and Trampolines- wk 20

 And we are back at it after about a week off for Christmas picking up with the Trojan war and trying out some of the blessing we received this Christmas. On our last day of break we took the kids to Top Golf here in Atlanta. Its an interactive driving range. The only person in our family with any golf expirence in my husband so it made for a fun afternoon as Mommy could be just as bad at something as the kids. Even Daddy was pretty rusty.

The girls spent part of break working on stop motion Minecraft movies from a kit Ying received as a gift. They loved taking stop animation Lego movies last year at coop and this allows them to continue the fun. The one down side is the app does not allow sharing of the movies they made. We hadn't realized this prior to purchasing it and were kinda of disappointed. We had thought they could make hisotry movies to share but oh well.

 Hulk got a Zoob Movers set. Its basically a robotic body that you can design legs, arms, and other features for. He loved controling it around that house..... Now on to school....

 Our Fava bean just keep growing. We transplanted it to a pot and staked it up. We are going to see how far we can go with it.It was so warm that we gave our bean plant some outdoor time also. It loved the unrestricted sunshine.

 As we read The Trojan War the girls decided to use the Nativity scene to reenact the scenes as we went...lol. It was quite hilarious and made the story stick for the kids. Forgive us Baby Jesus for your untimely demise as the hands of the Greeks.

We got some cool science lessons in this week. We discussed how sundials work based on the suns position in the sky. God also blessed us with a side lesson on cloud iridescence ( or cloud rainbows). It pretty rare here in the south to get the condition just right, especially on a 60 degree day. 

My Favorite Christmas gifts this Christmas were 2 rolling crates. One is storing our Spine books and workbooks down at Grandma and Grandpa's. Instead of having to chase books all over the house on different shelves we've sort of confiscated everything is in one concise place. It has shaved tons of time off our day and I am not harping on everyone constantly to clean up behind themselves. We roll it out to the table when we start and before everyone get to leave the table they put there stuff back in. We also got a smaller crate to function as our book basket/library transport. its fabulous when you taking out 50+ books a time now with 3 kids.

We continued on with writing strands this week and I was impressed by the stories I got. Its so funny how different the girls are when it comes to writing. They both finished the assignment meeting all qualifications but one had to get in a lot more details.

The weather finally cooperated for the kids to get their biggest Christmas present. Grandma and Grandpa got them a trampoline for their backyard. It lets them get some exercises on afternoons with Grandpa and during short breaks between subjects during school time. They were so excited to help put it together and finally get to jump.

We had to take a 30 min break during construction while Daddy was on the phone with his program director discussing his capstone project. Pretty sure she had no idea he wasn't "working"..lol

Week 18----- We have "itiesitis"

We have "itis" this week. We are all about the Canaanites, Jebusites, Hittites,Amorites, and on and on. Hulk says NO more "ites" However our study did line up nicely with some living history. One of our local churches puts on a great look back what life was like in the day when Jesus was born. While technically during the Roman era, many of the crafts and trades featured have histories tracing back to our current time period.

Ying and Yang pressing olives with a stone press to make olive oil.  The girls were very shocked when the shop keeper tried to barter with me for one of them as a wife for her son. It was unreal to them that in this time period they would be close to marriageable age.

A Prophet in the street warning of the coming Messiah

Capentry shop. We talked about how in  the time of the Canaanites the tools would have been broze or stone as steel and iron had not been discovered or spread to the area yet.

Wine shop.... We discussed that in acient times ( well ok actually until roughly 150 years ago) it was acutally safer to drink ferment drinks like wine and ale then water because in the process of making these parasites were killed. Today modern filitration and sanitation does this for us.

The Potter using a kick wheel.

The Roman Tax collector.... we had to get the mark of Caesar to show we had paid our taxes.

Yang getting hauled off by the Roman soldiers because she licked out the mark of Caesar...lol

We took a day off to get in the Christmas spirit. The kids helped Grandma and Grandpa with outdoor decorations, and made thank you cards and other crafts to decorate our home.

 We Also attended another local event : The Holiday Lights of Hope. This is a large walk though display benefited a local child advocacy charity. This was our first year and the kids had a blast. Their favorite part was the light maze. It sounds easy but was surprisingly difficult due to the effect of so many points of light in one place.... We got to the middle fine ( the Chick-fil-a Cow) but getting to the other side took much longer..lol because you were looking for a dark end.

 Anyway.. Happy Merry Christmas season....

THANKSGIVING AND A WEEK OF REST.

   The past two weeks have gone by in a blur of fun, family and friends. TAZ got out of the hospital at the beginning of the week, but since his  little brother was sick too; he was at home with his mom. We went back and completed Week 13 of the curriculum the week before Thanksgiving. We were pretty hit of miss on the Adventures part to be be honest. My girls are little burnt out on Pilgrims and Indians. We did enjoy the pumpkin science stuff and watching the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. One book recommendation I have is the National Geographic's 1621: A New look at Thanksgiving. It explores many of the myths of the first Thanksgiving. My girls found it interesting that the pilgrims didn't wear really wear black ( they were actually very colorful) and the Wampanoag did not have  colorful woven blankets and war bonnets like often shown ( those are items specific to plains and southwestern tribes). The rest of the week autopilot Math and computer based language arts. Hulk was a pilgrim carpenter in the preschool Thanksgiving pageant.
    We took the actual week of Thanksgiving off. Tomorrow we will try to get some sort of groove back, though I have work a 4 day weekend upcoming thanks to the implementation of a new computer system at the hospital. Joy.. no sleep for me!